This invention relates in general to electrical contactors used to make temporary contact with the leads of electrical devices, especially for testing purposes.
Prior art contactors consist of a plurality of individually manufactured and individually assembled contact leaves with no means of controlling the electrical characteristic impedance of the leaves, so that, in addition to being very costly to manufacture, the contactors create impedance anomalies between the test electronics and a device under test. Such anomalies tend to cause signal reflections which deteriorate the rise and fall times of test signals. Heretofore this has been acceptable for most devices because the deterioration was within acceptable limits due to the relatively slow rise and fall times, and therefore low frequency of the major components present in the test signals. But there is now an urgent need for a high frequency contactor, one whose characteristic impedance substantially matches that of the transmission medium between the contactor and the test electronics so that the faster rise and fall times of higher frequency test signals can be passed through a contactor substantially unaffected by the contactor. By maintaining the integrity of the rise and fall times of the signals, accurate testing of high speed devices is made possible.
A contactor without high frequency capability, however, would add artifacts to the signal, which mimic the characteristics of a defective device, therefore resulting in costly rejection of good devices.
Other advantages and attributes of this invention will be readily discernible from a reading of the text hereinafter.